Flying in from Tel Aviv recently, CBS newsman Bob Simon found himself facing yet another new slant in his thinking.
”What it comes down to,” says the veteran correspondent, who looks recovered from his six weeks in Iraqi prisons last year, ”is that we are what we`ve been through. I`m spouting cliches, but that`s the truth. I act the way I did, I think the way I did. But suddenly the experience became relevant.”
”The experience.” Also known as the mother of all media missteps, Persian Gulf War Division, January 1991. Bigfoot reporter strays across the border from Saudi Arabia and lands in Iraqi jails that make medieval dungeons look like Motel 6.
Simon was headed this way on his early May flight for a month of relative ease-he is, after all, still the network`s chief Mideast correspondent. A book tour loomed for ”Forty Days” (Putnam), the just-published account of his nasty incarceration. His daughter Tanya would be graduating from Columbia University. And he hoped for a brief reunion with at least one of the CBS crewmen who shared his encounter with Iraqi penology.
Entering a conference room at the CBS Broadcast Center, Bob Simon radiates the charm of the longtime insider. ”Did you say the magic word?” he asks his publicist, eager for some coffee.
As the morning sunshine floods in through a window, it brightens (and perhaps deepens) the Mideast tan of this Bronx native who boasts 25 years with the network, 67 countries covered, four Overseas Press Club awards and six Emmys. Despite a personal identification with Woody Allen-or at least with Allen`s ironic slant on life-Bob Simon betrays no hint of nerdiness.
Lean and fit at 50, he`s Edward R. Murrow with the syntax of a standup comic, but still every bit the world-wise foreign correspondent. His New York costume change into blue shirt, red striped tie and double-breasted blazer with gold buttons can`t disguise his globe-trotter status. He bears no stigmata of martyrdom.
But ”Forty Days,” a pithy, unpretentious prison memoir, relates a harrowing tale. On Jan. 21, 1991, Simon and his three-member CBS crew-British producer Peter Bluff, cameraman Roberto Alvarez and sound man Juan Caldera-ventured across the border from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait, hoping to break news suppressed by the Pentagon`s constricting pool coverage in Dhahran. Picked up by Iraqi soldiers and quickly imprisoned, Simon and his team suffered their biblical stretch of beatings, interrogation, hunger and abuse. A `sense of immunity`
”I never was a guy who would hang out in the bars of the Caravelle and the Commodore,” Simon remarks, referring to the legendary hotel havens for the press in Saigon and Beirut. ”That scene always disgusted me.” Yet while not ”gung ho” about dangerous war coverage, Simon says: ”I`d go. Not out of macho, frankly. I`d just go.”
Thinking back to his fateful day in January 1991, he still believes he has done many things ”that were a lot crazier.” During the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, for instance, he ordered his driver to take him through a dangerous stretch of the highway near the city because of sheer ”impetus”-he just couldn`t bear driving back the ”long, tedious and miserable” eight hours to Tel Aviv.
”I wanted to get to Beirut,” Simon recalls. ”So I said to the driver,
`Let`s do it.` And we did it. They opened fire, and there were some shells that landed around us. . . . Three minutes later we were past it, and we stopped and got a Coke on the road. And 10 minutes later I checked into the air-conditioned room in the Commodore.”
But last January, he says, if he had really thought the Saudi-Kuwait border crossing would be dangerous, he wouldn`t have done it, even though he acknowledges that war correspondents feel ”a certain sense of immunity. That you`re there as sort of a privileged witness. . . . I don`t know if it comes out of the profession or out of childhood. But it`s there. And that`s what broke down over 40 days.”
Life-saving mistake
Starting with his team`s unlucky arrest near Al Ruqi, the inland border post between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ”Forty Days” reports the action blow by blow, with Simon adding small sardonic touches that would never make the evening news:
”The jeep pulled up a few yards from the road. The driver got out and slowly came toward us saying, `Peace.` He was not carrying a rifle. His pistol was in his holster. Two other men were getting out of the back of the jeep. Defectors? More defectors? Peter extended his hand to the driver. Roberto was filming the scene. It was television.”
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A pre-crisis error on his International Red Cross card saves Simon on the first day, as it will later. The card gives his religion as Protestant. Simon originally had protested and asked an official to change it to Jewish, but relented. It was one decision he never regretted.
The early pages of ”Forty Days” record the team`s initial Press Bar jauntiness, when they are still confident they`ll be swiftly released. Simon writes of joking to his colleagues that they`d call New York and say:
”Listen, we heard you had some openings in the Baghdad bureau. We took a shortcut.” The merriment fades when their initial guards, ”officers and gentlemen,” pass them on to a rougher lot, and the first cane comes down on Simon`s leg.
”I was blindfolded. A cane came down on my other leg. I did not scream that time and another cane came down. I felt welts rising on my thighs. Then the canes were beating me on the head. There were two men doing the beating, one on either side of me. There was another man in the room shouting the questions.”
As Simon and his crew get transferred from one prison to another, he develops a mantra (”Most POWs survive”) and a credo (”Never believe anything they tell you”). He catches on that when he`s asked where he`s from, ”New York” is a better answer than ”America,” since the Iraqis tend to whack him after the latter, but may ask about the Mets when they hear the former.
Keeping his wits
The beneficiary for most of his life of good, civilized living, a lover of fine wine and opera, Simon learns that no interest ”can compete with unremitting pain.” He comes to appreciate the little things-a toothbrush, a cup, an extra piece of bread. He fantasizes about eating at New York`s Carnegie Deli. He thinks about his French wife, Francoise, and their courtship at the University of Lyons during his 1962 Fulbright scholarship. He wonders who`s preparing his obituary at CBS News, and whether the network will assign another correspondent to Israel. Scrutinized like an animal, he decides he will ”never go to a zoo again.”
And he`s beaten.
He undergoes new experiences. Waiting for hours to urinate, he`s not allowed to finish because the group pail is full and can`t spill over. He stands by helplessly as an angry officer forces his mouth open, spits in it and screams ”Yahoudi!” (”Jew!”).
At all times, Simon tries to hold on to his sense of humor. He recognizes that he has easily set ”the world record for time spent by a TV correspondent without looking in a mirror.” He and his producer, Peter Bluff, enjoy a repeated bit of repartee with a young guard. Bluff regularly tells the Iraqi, ”Mr. Bob very big man in America.” The soldier replies, ”Yes, but Mr. Bob very little man in Iraq.”
Simon also tries to keep his wits about him even in tempting moments. When a man outside his cell one morning asks him, ”Do you speak Hebrew?”
he`s smart enough to say no.
Suddenly one morning, a guard announces, ”The president orders you free.” After an uncertain car ride to the Al Rasheed Hotel, it`s all over. The ragged-bearded Simon has lost 35 pounds.
Within hours, he`s the guest of King Hussein of Jordan on the royal helicopter back to Amman. Mr. Bob is on his way back to being a very big man- though a somewhat troubled one-in the Mideast.
In ”Forty Days,” Simon wisely covers the ”aftershock” of his recovery as well. The oddball letters from strangers (some addressed to Paul Simon). The difficulty in reopening emotional valves. The trip back to Iraq for a documentary. The ex-prisoners who wanted to swap stories. The sudden warmth of Israeli officials, previously cool because of his intifada coverage, but now eager to imply ”we told you so” in subtle ways. Simon found writing a book much tougher than writing for TV. ”In television writing,” he says in the conference room, ”you never have to use adjectives or adverbs. You don`t have to say the sand is white because you see that the sand is white.”
He admits that there are ”all sorts of things” he`ll never understand about his captivity. While the experience made him conscious of his Jewishness, for instance, he acknowledges no change in regard to it: ”I`ve never been religious, and I didn`t become religious.”
Would he go back to Iraq yet again? ”Now that this book is out, I don`t think I can go back,” he says. ”Not as long as this crowd`s in power.” But he hopes he can someday, because ”Iraqis are really nice people.”